Recent news followup

Last week we talked about a single rumored arrest over the OiNK torrent tracker. Since then, there’s been a confirmed report of 6 arrests. The arrests appear to be the result of users uploading pre-release music to the now defunct site. For some time, police have had access to the OiNK user records minus the passwords which are thought to be stored as a salted MD5 hash. It seems British authorities can force these individuals to reveal passwords under something called the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

I’ve been reading now for the last year, as a daily user. I’m afraid to say the quality of recent ‘hacks’ has dropped dramatically.

One of the things that really made this site really unique was the percentage of ‘good’ posts, which normally stayed around 80~90% of all posted content.

That percentage has dropped dramatically, and while the quantity of good hacks hasn’t changed much.. There’s a lot of bad stuff in with it, diluting the overall value of the site. Please, don’t ruin such a good place.

hackaday evolves, and should evolve, over time. the post was filed under “news”, so quit whining about it.

while it may not be hacks, it certainly is news. and contrary to some of you, i actually find it interesting. i’d never have heard about the oink arrests if i hadn’t read hackaday — and as a former oink user i like to keep updated about the oink case.

come on guys, so you have to skip a post you don’t like every now and again because you don’t like it? big deal. you don’t have to stop reading the site!

you can just ignore the posts you don’t like! There’s still always at least one good hack each day now, so just skip these news posts and go to them

i for one welcome the news posts. if they had displaced posts about hacks i might have different feelings about them, but they haven’t, they’re extras. if your cell phone provider started giving you 500 free texts a month when you only used to get free calls when you signed up, would you stop using them find another service provider? no, if anything you just wouldn’t use the texts if you didn’t need them. if you don’t like the news posts, scroll past them! it saves you having to read them and us having the comments filled with whining!

i don’t visit sites that focus on news sites because they’re usually just paid advertising, and i’m not that interested in news that much. however, its nice to see a bit of news on this site, as its only ever one post a day (two at most) and it just lets me know what’s going on. its also written by the same people who write about the hacks they like on this site, so i know its going to be interesting and not some advertisement in disguise

but please, if you do have to leave the site because of the new, extra content, do so without posting about it first. comments are for discussion of the articles, not that im one to talk with this off topic post :)

Colour images scare mewhy cant people just use color images like us americans? :(hackaday has a news section for a reason, i personally enjoy seeing stories pop up from time to time but, they should not take the place of a hack, they should at the very least be a secondary posting

although 6 people got arrested, like many times in the past, they are making examples to try to deter others, as long as the CRIA doesnt get pissed at demonoid again…. :)